Idols for Destruction: The Conflict of Christian Faith and American Culture

Preface

Robert H. Bork

TO say that American culture is changing rapidly is to state not merely the obvious but the obtrusive. The evidence is thrust at us dozens of times every day. Social, moral, and legal constraints that were effective quite recently are now breached regularly and with impunity. Everyone can cite illustrations. Rock music, in itself degenerate, now comes with lyrics celebrating everything from perverted sex described in graphic terms to anti-Semitism. The United States government funds obscene displays of homoerotic photographs that not long ago would have attracted the attention of the police rather than taxpayers’ dollars. It was never reasonable to expect television to be the educational force some predicted, but surely it is surprising that the popular programming slipped so rapidly from Sid Caesar and Imogene Coco to Roseanne Barr, whose form of humor would not have been shown ten or fifteen years ago. A federal judge feels free to rule, which can only be called preposterous, that after two hundred years the first amendment has suddenly evolved so that begging in the subways of New York is protected free speech—and professors of law announce that it would be very difficult to rule any other way.

If these appear to be instances of individualism, or moral relativism, run wild, in yet other areas of life developments seem to be running the other way. When the Supreme Court displayed some mild resistance to the imposition or coercion of racial and sexual quotas where there has been no showing of discrimination, the outcry from politically powerful groups was enormous and there is a strong movement in Congress to put quotas back in place. An increasing number of institutions and local governments punish individuals for choosing not to deal with other individuals who are homosexual. Individual moral choice is not to be allowed in such matters.

There are those, of course, who hail both trends—that of individualism run rampant and that of collective intrusion into individual judgment and morality—as welcome advances in freedom. It may be difficult to see how moral relativism and state-enforced morality can both be gains for freedom, but in the current state of public discourse simplistic, heated, and self-righteous rhetoric is very powerful. It may be apparent by now that 1 am out of sympathy with these cultural trends. Apparendy divergent, they seem to me consistent primarily in being assaults on traditional virtues. Not long ago I heard a thoughtful clergyman, a man not given to violent rhetoric, say that Americans are moving into a sub-pagan culture. The expression jolted a bit, but a moment’s reflection suggested that the point is certainly arguable.

Most of us shake our heads and bemoan the latest outrage but are helpless to understand why our culture seems increasingly degraded. In Idols for Destruction, Herbert Schlossberg offers an analysis that seems to me increasingly persuasive. Some few years ago friends whose judgment I greatly respect argued that religion constitutes the only reliable basis for morality and that when religion loses its hold on a society, standards of morality will gradually crumble. I objected that there were many moral people who are not at all religious; my friends replied that such people are living on the moral capital left by generations that believed there is a God and that He makes demands on us. The prospect, they said, was that the remaining moral capital would dwindle and our society become less moral. The course of society and culture has been as they predicted, which certainly does not prove their point but does provide evidence for it.

Schlossberg makes the same point. After biblical faith wanes, a people can maintain habits of thought and of self-restraint. The ethic remains after the faith that bore it departs. But eventually a generation arises that no longer has the habit, and that is when the behavior changes radically.

To many, this will seem a counsel of despair. Since we live in a rational and scientific age, it will be said, it is impossible to believe the superstitions of religion. If faith is required, then our moral capital is bound to dwindle and cannot be rebuilt. Schlossberg’s response to that argument is one of the great strengths of his book. He examines the major belief systems that have replaced religion in our time—e.g., historicism, materialism, scientism—and demonstrates that each of them rests upon premises which the believer must accept on faith: All alternatives to Christian doctrine are themselves grounded in unprovable assumptions, and in that sense cannot be distinguished from positions of faith. Dogma is inescapable notwithstanding the failure of so many to recognize the pervasiveness and fragility of their own belief systems. Of course that is correct. Nobody lives without some idea of what life is, even if the idea is that life is essentially meaningless and governed by random events. But even that position constitutes a philosophy that cannot be proved correct and thus rests upon an act of faith or, if you prefer, a leap to a premise.

Those who do not accept a God who stands outside of natural processes have no more reason for their faith than Christians who believe that Jesus rose on the third day or Jews who believe God made them His chosen people. Many people have a sort of vague idea that one day science will reveal everything, but that rests upon a number of assumptions essentially taken on faith, among them that there is a natural world independent of the mind that purports to observe it and that that universe is ultimately reducible to laws the mind can discover. Perhaps these things will ultimately prove to be true but at the moment they are taken on faith. It is not necessary to that proposition to point out that reports from the front lines suggest to the layman that natural science’s difficulties with ultimate reality are increasing rather than diminishing. We are told that nobody understands quantum physics and that some physicists think there may be no reality, or none other than mathematics. At the other end of the spectrum, we are told that cosmology is in grave difficulty and that the more humans peer into the universe, the less they are able to understand how it achieved its present condition. The belief that science will ultimately comprehend the nature of reality at both the micro and macro levels is no less founded on faith than the belief that there is a God and that Jesus was His son.

If that were all, the reader might conclude that this leaves us free to accept on faith any system of comprehending life that appeals to us for any reason. Schlossberg most emphatically disagrees. The book’s title is taken from Hosea, who said the Israelites’ idolatry had brought their nation to ruin. With their silver and gold they made idols for their own destruction. The trouble with silver and gold idols is not that they are made of silver and gold but that they are things men put in the place of God. For that reason, idols need not consist of graven images. Schlossberg is surely correct, therefore, to classify as an idol any value or principle that men substitute for God.

Schlossberg’s thesis is that these philosophical idols—historicism, humanism, science, and so on—do indeed lead to our destruction, that they are in themselves pernicious. These demonstrations are, for me at least, the most interesting parts of the book. Schlossberg has read widely and thought deeply in philosophy, economics, politics, religion, and much more in order to explain the destructiveness of the idols of non-religious belief systems. His argument in these areas does not depend on Christian faith but meets the alternative belief systems on their own grounds. A reader need not be in the least religious to find this aspect of the book enormously rewarding.

From what I have said so far, it may be supposed that Herbert Schlossberg has written a book uncritically admiring of religion and its institutions. The reader will be rapidly disabused of that notion by the chapter entitled Idols of Religion, in which it is argued that the institutions of religion are and always have been particularly susceptible to the hazards of idolatry. Today, by and large, the religious institutions of the United States do not teach values that are distinctive to their own traditions but rather use religious terminology that ratifies the values of the broader society. Church leaders variously adopt as religious values Marxism, liberation theology, the latest trend in psychology; the secular religions insinuate themselves into the Christian churches and leach them of their distinctive religious values.

Meanwhile [Schlossberg writes], we are left with a church that to a large extent has chosen to befriend the powers that dominate the world instead of judging them. We should be reminded that the crucifixion of Christ was a joint production, instigated by religious authorities and then carried out by the state. When the state joins forces with historidsm and humanism in forging the great brutalities of the future, we should not be surprised to find the representatives of the establishment churches, fuglemen for the idolatries, earnestly assuring us that God’s will is being done.

That is why Schlossberg says, In a society in which idolatry runs rampant, a church that is not iconoclastic is a travesty. If it is not against the idols it is with them.

Perhaps Mr. Schlossberg owes us another book, one that speaks at greater length about the nature of a just society as defined by Christianity. But this book is a marvel as it stands. An emptiness lies at the center of liberal democratic ideology. Vastly superior though it is to alternative forms of government—authoritarianism and totalitarianism, in the various forms this century has shown us—individual freedom and democratic governance leave the question of life’s meaning untouched. Yet most people cannot live without assigning meaning of some sort to their existence and, as religious belief has faded, the idols have tried to provide that meaning. At the moment, the most virulent of the idols in America appears to be the belief that political results of a leftist variety are the only things that count; and we are observing the politidzation of our culture with consequent damage to institutions and disciplines that once had standards of integrity unrelated to political results. That is today’s cultural war, and since the idol of politics rests upon faith quite as much as any other belief system, our cultural wars are religious wars. Idols for Destruction is a powerful weapon on the right side of the religious wars and has restated the case for a Christianity unrelated to, indeed ranged against, the secular religions of our time.

. . . they made idols

for their own destruction.

—Hosea 8:4

Introduction

THE technological flowering and economic expansion of the twentieth century has been accompanied by an astonishing growth in pessimism, even despair. The period just before the turn of the century was so charged with a sense of decadence that the phrase fin de suele has come to convey the idea of decline, with a foreboding of doom. Those fears were not groundless, and Europe and the United States plunged into a devastating world war, then a great depression, and then another world war. Those disasters in turn have served to convince many people that Western civilization has entered a period of breakdown from which it may never recover.

The last thirty-five years, though prosperous almost beyond belief, have been visited with social pathologies that reinforce the sourness of those earlier expectations. Our society is now described in such terms as post-capitalist (Ralf Dahrendorf), post-bourgeois (George Lichtheim), post-modern (Amitai Etzioni), post-collectivist (Sam Beer), post-literary (Marshall McLuhan), post-civilized (Kenneth Boulding), post-traditional (S. N. Eisenstadt), post-historic (Roderick Seidenberg), post-industrial (Daniel Bell), post-Puritan, post-Protestant and post-Christian (Sidney Ahlstrom).¹

Examples abound in which the images of contemporary society have shifted to decline, disintegration, atrophy, and so on. Arnold Toynbee reminisced late in life about his family’s expectations around the turn of the century. His scientist uncle was wildly optimistic about the future, anticipating that a golden age was about to be ushered in by science. His social worker father, on the other hand, was rather somber as he contemplated the future. At the time he found his uncle’s outlook exhilarating and his father’s melancholy. By 1969, however, Toynbee had concluded that his uncle had been naive and his father realistic.²

The case of H. G. Wells is more striking because the evolution of his thinking is marked by a trail of books that shows plainly the descending path. His Outline of History (1920) was a song of evolutionary idealism, faith in progress, and complete optimism. By 1933, when he published The Shape of Tilings to Come, he could see no better way to overcome the stubbornness and selfishness between people and nations than a desperate action by intellectual idealists to seize control of the world by force and establish their vision with a universal compulsory educational program. Finally, shortly before his death, he wrote an aptly-titled book, The Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945) in which he concluded that there is no way out, or around, or through the impasse. It is the end. In Wells’s journey to despair Reinhold Niebuhr saw an almost perfect record in miniature of the spiritual pilgrimage of our age.³

A few examples illustrate the point further. A French Catholic philosopher: The end of the Roman Empire was a minor event compared with what we behold. We are looking at the liquidation of what is known as the ‘modern world.’⁴ A British journalist: I have to report the affairs of a world which has lost its faith, which is like a fish out of water or a drowning man, desperately thrashing around for lack of oxygen. Since the time of Christ there has been no period in which there has been the same feeling of . . . spiritual impoverishment.⁵ A German sociologist: Civilization is collapsing before our eyes.⁶

William Rees-Mogg, former editor of the Times of London, while writing of the hollowness and despair that have gripped Western society, has hope that Americans will escape the general malaise and retain an optimism that will serve to redeem the remainder of the West.⁷ But the United States does not lack for observers who disagree with him. In terms strikingly similar to those of Rees-Mogg, William Foxwell Albright, the distinguished archaeologist, said that American society is at an impasse similar to that of the Hellenic world at the time of Christ.⁸ Sociologist Robert Bellah believes that the United States is undergoing a third time of trial, which may be even more severe than those of the Revolution and the Civil War.⁹ With some exaggeration, perhaps, two social scientists assign the shift to despair to a single decade: the 1960s. Daniel Moynihan, now a United States Senator, believes that at that time a set of untroubled, even serene convictions as to the nature of man and society, and the ever more promising prospects of the future, of a sudden collapsed. No one any longer really believed it.¹⁰ And Daniel Bell, a sociologist at Harvard University, noticed a plethora of writings in the 1950s on such subjects as a prodigious growth in productivity, superabundance, and the problems of leisure. All that has come to an end. Paradoxically, the vision of Utopia was suddenly replaced by the spectre of Doomsday.¹¹

Now, one might object that this outpouring of pessimism reveals the disaffection with society that one expects from intellectuals, and that ordinary people are far less dissatisfied than those chronic complainers. Crane Brinton, himself a Harvard intellectual, made such an argument two decades ago,¹² but it is hard to believe that he would be so certain of that now. A Roper poll commissioned by the U. S. Department of Labor reported in 1978 that, for the first time since that poll was initiated in 1959, the respondents rated their expectations for the future lower than their assessment of the present.

Of course, all of this evidence is subjective, and one could argue that if objective criteria were examined we would find that everything really is getting better and better just as we used to think, even if nobody believes it. We will have occasion later on to look at some of the objective information at our disposal, but there will not be much to support that rosy view.

Understanding Our Place in History

A society conscious of its place in history is seldom content merely to note changing circumstances with no attempt to evaluate their meaning. Edward Gibbon’s history of Rome made spatial analogies—such as rise, decline, and fall—commonplace in evaluating civilizations. In the twentieth century, organic phrases perhaps have become more common, possibly due to Oswald Spengler’s influence. Societies are thought of as being born, growing, decaying, dying. Other terms are sometimes drawn from the social sciences or from the requirements of political propaganda. Thus, a society may be said to be coming of age, to be attaining self-consciousness, to be throwing off the chains of oppression, to be entering a dark age, to be entering a golden age.

We make such evaluations because we are not content with mere descriptions of events or recitations of facts and statistics. We want, rather, to be able to understand their meaning, and we cannot do that without having an idea about the end toward which those events are proceeding. Even the most cynical among us, if they have not reached the nadir of complete nihilism, have this teleological orientation. We can say that society is growing up (or regressing) because we have an idea of what a society would be like if it should reach a state analagous to mature adulthood. We can say a society is dying because we think we know what a dead society would be like. Or we can speak about the arrival of a golden age because we have in mind a state of full equality or complete order or extravagant prosperity, or whatever vision would inspire us to use such a phrase.

These teleological visions are agglomerations of values, often having powerful emotional force even if one is not conscious of their components. That is why they have the power to energize people in such extraordinary ways. Men may risk everything, including their lives, for family, for wealth, for country, for class, or for the kingdom of God. Even the cynic who believes he is above all that nonsense has established a hierarchy of values; otherwise he could not identify those values as nonsense. We may think his vision crabbed and deformed, but neither we nor he can deny that he has one.

All such visions are freighted with religious content, although this is often not recognized. They contain at least some of the components we expect to find in religions: a theory of knowledge, an authoritative literature, a theory of historical relationships, a cosmology, a hierarchy of values, and an eschatology. To cite an obvious example, Marxism, which some people still insist on calling a science, has every one of those features. What more could anyone ask of a religion? Well, it might be said that a religion should have God as its end. But anyone with a hierarchy of values has placed something at its apex, and whatever that is is the god he serves. The Old and New Testaments call such gods idols and provide sufficient reason for affirming that the systems that give them allegiance are religions. The semantic difficulty comes in part from assuming that to call something a religion is to express a value judgment. Those in our own day who are pleased or affronted at being identified with a religion should ask why that is so. The biblical writers did not speak of religion as something to be revered, and there is no good reason for any of us to feel honored or dishonored at being so identified.

Christianity, along with its Hebraic antecedents, is by its nature historically minded. It rejects both cyclical theories of history and notions of the eternality of the universe. The doctrines of creation and of eschatology are explicit statements that history has both a beginning and an end and that it is possible to say something intelligible about both. Events between the two termini are also intelligible, and, being related to them, have meaning. From those relationships we may infer that general evaluations of the state of our society ought to be of great interest to Christians and that Christian faith has insights of close relevance to this discussion.

Idolatry as a Framework for Understanding

This raises the question of what analogy Christians are to use in understanding our society. It is a curious fact that the Old Testament, which describes the beginning, course, and end of a number of societies, never assesses them as being on the rise or decline, as progressing or regressing, as growing to maturity or falling to senescence. One might object that only a failed sense of history could expect an evaluation of society to take the forms that would be common two or three millenia in the future. Yet those particular analogies do not seem anachronistic for the time and place we are considering. The idea of cataclysmic fall as a result of moral failure is common enough in the biblical literature, and analogies relating to the life cycle could hardly have been foreign to nomads, herdsmen, and farmers.

Spatial and biological analogies are incompatible with biblical thinking because they are both quantitatively oriented and deterministic. To say that a society is young is to imply that on a scale between birth and the expected three-score-and-ten, this society is, say, thirty, and when its time has run out it will die. Spatial analogies lead us to expect that what goes up must come down; they imply a trajectory that can be plotted and an apex that is determined by such numerical factors as velocity, weight, and angle. In place of these analogies the biblical explanation of the end of societies uses the concept of judgment. It depicts them as either having submitted themselves to God or else having rebelled against him. Far from being a typical nationalistic exaltation of a chosen people, the Old Testament portrays Israel as having become an evil nation, fully deserving the judgment that God meted to it. Its rebellion against God was accompanied by a turning to idols, and this idolatry brought the nation to its end. With their silver and gold, said the prophet Hosea, they made idols for their own destruction (Hos. 8:4).

Idolatry in its larger meaning is properly understood as any substitution of what is created for the creator. People may worship nature, money, mankind, power, history, or social and political systems instead of the God who created them all. The New Testament writers, in particular, recognized that the relationship need not be explicitly one of cultic worship; a man can place anyone or anything at the top of his pyramid of values, and that is ultimately what he serves. The ultimacy of that service profoundly affects the way he lives. When the society around him also turns away from God to idols, it is an idolatrous society and therefore is heading for destruction.

Western society, in turning away from Christian faith, has turned to other things. This process is commonly called secularization, but that conveys only the negative aspect. The word connotes the turning away from the worship of God while ignoring the fact that something is being turned to in its place. Even atheisms are usually idolatrous, as Neibuhr said, because they elevate some principle of coherence to the central meaning of life and this is what then provides the focus of significance for that life. Niebuhr’s principle of coherence corresponds to what we referred to earlier as the apex of the hierarchy of values. All such principles that substitute for God exemplify the biblical concept of idol. The bulk of this book is an exploration of the forms these idols take in late twentieth-century America.

Ideas and Action

Our argument, then, is that idolatry and its associated concepts provide a better framework for us to understand our own society than do any of the alternatives. Toynbee was right to say that by the 1950s, the crucial questions confronting Western Man were all religious,¹³ because of the inevitable dependence of a society’s actions on its beliefs. If its actions are destructive, we must ask what it believes that causes it to behave in such a way. Now, to some people such statements are axiomatic, but others would sharply dispute them. Many social scientists, in particular, would quarrel with a formulation that ties behavior to belief, and that is a disagreement we shall have to deal with at some length.

For the moment, however, let us consider another kind of critic, much more numerous in our society. The emphasis on ideas and beliefs in this discussion does not find warm welcome in an age that respects the tough-minded pragmatist who disdains philosophy and insists on the immediate, the concrete, and the practical. But it is impossible for anyone to say that he will avoid philosophies and simply live pragmatically, because that statement is based on a philosophical belief that he has accepted without realizing it. Legions of ordinary people know how to use such ideas as inferiority complex, relativity, and pragmatism, although scarcely any of them have read a page of Freud, Einstein, or Dewey. Those philosophies may come down in transmogrified form, but come down they do. That is the wisdom in John Maynard Keynes’s remark that Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.¹⁴

Our anti-philosophers are especially vulnerable in this age, because the media fill our environment with popularized philosophies. Marshall McLuhan was right in saying that environments tend not to be noticed (although he exaggerated the effect). We see many of their explicit contents, but the environments themselves are imperceptible.¹⁵ We do not see the environment, as Os Guinness says, because we see with it. That means we are influenced by ideas we do not notice and therefore are not aware of their effect on us. Or, if we see the effect, we find it difficult to discover the cause.

Given our media-saturated existences, we would do well to consider how Keynes’s academic scribblers (of whom Keynes was one) affect us. Some academic disciplines, especially those in the social sciences, are profoundly anti-Christian in their effect, and it is difficult to counter that effect by dealing with their evidence or their arguments. The evidence is often good and the arguments sound. It is the assumptions we must question. These are statements that are presumed to be true but are not proven. No serious thought can be conducted without assumptions, but recognizing them—in our own thinking as well as in others—is vital if we are to avoid falling into serious error. Assumptions are beliefs; if they were proven they would not be assumptions. And they are beliefs so taken for granted that it is not deemed necessary to prove them. That makes them doubly seductive: first, because the careless or untrained are misled into accepting conclusions without recognizing their shaky foundation of unstated beliefs; and second, the very fact that the most dubious beliefs are so taken for granted by experts lends an aura of verisimilitude that beguiles the overly respectful into accepting them without question.

By and large there is nothing insincere about the way these assumptions are held. They function in some respects much the way religious beliefs do, although in academia they are seldom recognized in that way. And that explains the vehemence with which attacks on someone’s assumptions are met; they are often attacks on that person’s unacknowledged religion.

Although academic disciplines by their nature have wide divergencies of opinion within them, they also have broad areas of common agreement. This book takes issue with some of those agreements, sometimes with the evidence or arguments in their favor, but more often with the beliefs with which the investigations were begun. Soundly designed experiments, complete data, airtight controls, scrupulous honesty, and rigorous logic yield wrong conclusions when the original assumptions are wrong.

Unfortunately, many Christian intellectuals and others who influence ecclesiastical policy have adopted the academic models too uncritically. Peter Berger, a Rutgers University sociologist, has accused opinion leaders in the church of taking their cues increasingly from the official reality-definers—that is, from the highly secularized intellectual elite.¹⁶ In an earlier essay, Berger had explained what was wrong with that. Liberal intellectuals are always top candidates for the role of fall guy, for the simple reason that it is of the essence of liberalism to be contemporaneous and of the essence of being an intellectual to know what is contemporaneous.¹⁷ He need not have wasted his sympathy, for their wounds are all self-inflicted. These intellectuals must have been the people W. R. Inge had in mind when he made his famous remark that he who marries the spirit of an age soon finds himself a widower.

Idols of the Left, Right, and Center

The irony in Berger’s point is that the churches’ intellectuals are falling for intellectual fashions that have used up all their capital and fallen into bankruptcy. It was hard to see that in the nineteenth century when Christians began retreating before the new ideologies. Now American religion is full of the contradictions and paradoxes that come from the attempt to merge a true gospel with the faltering creeds of the surrounding society. The internal clash is reflected in the title of one of Niebuhr’s books: Pious and Secular America. Elsewhere, Niebuhr described the prevailing national religiosity as a perversion of the Christian gospel, aggravating the nation’s problems.¹⁸

A pluralistic society heralds the virtues of paths that have no exits. George Forell, a theologian at the University of Iowa, has described the political movements that range across the spectrum from left to right as rival deck stewards competing with each other about the arrangement of the deck chairs just before the Titanic hits the iceberg.¹⁹ German sociologist Karl Mannheim reveals the intellectual barrenness of thinking that one has said something when he has pasted a label. Nothing is simpler than to maintain that a certain type of thinking is feudal, bourgeois or proletarian, liberal, socialistic, or conservative, as long as there is no analytical method for demonstrating it and no criteria have been adduced which will provide a control over the demonstration.²⁰ Those terms have rendered service mainly as polemical devices to smear opponents and as shorthand methods of identifying friends and enemies. (This book will make some small contribution to civility by forbearing their use except to identify self-labels. Thus, when someone is called a conservative on these pages, it only means that that is what he calls himself.)

The struggle between For ell’s deck stewards may usefully be thought of as a clash of idols, beckoning to us as antinomies: capitalism and socialism, individualism and collectivism, statism and libertarianism, rationalism and irrational ism, nature worship and historicism, conservatism and liberalism, reaction and radicalism, elitism and equalitarianism. The conflicting parties and the media create false dilemmas, and the ecclesiastical leaders lunge at them as if the only response to a dilemma were to impale themselves on one of its horns. The issues of the day are so contrived as to create the illusion that every choice is wrong, that nothing can be done without doing some evil, and that the only question is which course of action is less evil. Reinhold Niebuhr—the father of us all, George Kennan called him—whose genius did so much to reveal the destructive self-righteousness of the twentieth-century Utopias, did not serve us well on this matter. Lesser men who learned from him that there is no course of action without its admixture of evil and that one must choose between evils concluded, naturally enough, that doing evil must not be so bad.

The participants in this struggle, along with their ecclesiastical admirers, insist that we have to choose between left and right on every issue, that there is no third way. But if we are successful in identifying the first two ways as idols, then it is reasonable to conclude that there must be a third way. The final purpose of this book is to make some progress toward finding out what it is.

¹Compiled by Richard John Neuhaus, Time Toward Home: The American Experiment as Revelation (New York: Seabury, 1975), pp. 1f.

²Arnold J. Toynbee, Experiences (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), p. 299.

³Reinhold Niebuhr, Faith and History: A Comparison of Christian and Modern Views of History (New York: Scribner’s, 1949), pp. 162f.

⁴Jacques Maritain, Christianity and Democracy (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1945), p. 12.

⁵William Rees-Mogg, An Humbler Heaven: The Beginnings of Hope (London: Hamtsh Hamilton, 1977), p. 2.

⁶Karl Mannheim, Man and Society: In an Age of Reconstruction (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1940) p. 15.

⁷Ress-Mogg, An Humbler Heaven, p. 58.

⁸William Foxwell Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity: Monotheism and the Historical Process, 2nd ed. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1957), p. 403.

⁹Robert N. Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial (New York: Seabury, 1975), p. 1.

¹⁰Daniel P. Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty (New York: Free Press, 1969), p. 7.

¹¹Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Ideas in the Fifties, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1962), pp. 460-63.

¹²Crane Brinton, A History of Western Morals (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1959), pp. 391f.

¹³Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, abridgement by D. C. Somervell, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1947, 1957), vol. 2, p. 314. This is not to say that the commonly advanced religious answers are of value. Toynbee’s repeated portrayals of religion as the goal of civilization come perilously close to making an idol of it.

¹⁴John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Unemployment, Interest and Money, p. 383, quoted in Walter Lippmann, An Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society (Boston: Little, Brown, 1937), p. 45.

¹⁵Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965 [1964]), p. vii.

¹⁶Peter L. Berger, A World With Windows, in Peter L. Berger and Richard John Neuhaus, cds., Against the World for the World (New York: Seabury, 1976), p. 12.

¹⁷Peter L. Berger, The Liberal as the Fall Guy, The Center Magazine, vol. 5, no. 4, July-August 1972, p. 39.

¹⁸Reinhold Niebuhr, Religiosity and the Christian Faith, Christianity and Crisis, May 28, 195J, reprinted in Reinhold Niebuhr, Essays in Applied Christianity, ed. D. B. Robertson (New York: Meridian, Living Age, 1959), p. 65.

¹⁹George Forell, Reason, Relevance and a Radical Gospel, in Berger and Neu-haus, eds., Against the World for the World, p. 76.

²⁰Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubncr, 1946 [1936]), p. 45.

C H A P T E R    O N E

Idols of History

ALL idols belong either to nature or to history. The whole creation falls into those two categories, and there is no other place to which man can turn to find a substitute for God. Any idol that is not an artifact of the natural world is an artifact of the social world. ¹

In this chapter, history is used in a more restricted sense. We are considering here the idolatrous thinking that focuses its attention on the historical process itself, reserving for later a discussion of the outcomes of such thinking, that is, the idols created from within the theater of history. It may suffice to say at this point that idolatry based oh history becomes power politics and, finally, one of numerous systems that people use to control other people.

History as a Religious Enterprise

Early in this century German historian Oswald Spengler published his monumental interpretation of Western civilization, The Decline of the West. With equally monumental confidence, he declared that the book contains the incontrovertible formulation of an idea which, once enunciated clearly, will . . . be accepted without dispute.² Spengler probably had in mind, as did many of his contemporaries, the great scientific theories that had received virtually unanimous acceptance, and he hoped his theory of history would have similar success. The book achieved great popularity but never fulfilled its author’s expectations. It is little read today, and one would have to search hard to find anyone who found its argument incontrovertible. Spengler’s mistake lay in thinking that theories of histoxy were of the same order as theories of physics or biology. Time, however, is a religious concept, and there can be no agreement on a philosophy of history without agreement on religion.

Whether time is important or unimportant, intelligible or absurd, cyclical or linear are questions intimately bound up with the most fundamental of metaphysical, anthropological, and theological convictions. The linearity of Western conceptions of history reflects the conviction that history is what comes between creation and final judgment. But there are other models. Ancient theories of cyclical history were related to religious ideas concerning the periodic nature of redemption. Norman O. Brown, Freud’s romantic reviser and popularizer, rightly described secular rationalism, dependent as it is on Newtonian time, as a religion. The new relativist notion of time represents the disintegration of that religion.³

What we think of the meaning of history is inseparable from what we think of the meaning of life. In this sense, says Herbert Butterfield, a Cambridge historian, our interpretation of the human drama throughout the ages rests finally on our interpretation of our most private experiences of life, and stands as merely an extension to it.⁴

That the question of history has any importance at all is in itself a religious conclusion. The classical view was that reason transcends the facts of history, just as universals transcend particulars. Therefore, historical events—as, indeed, all change—were relatively unimportant. The cycles of history were not drawn to a goal but would keep on recurring endlessly. This notion devalued events and robbed them of significance. Eastern mystics also devalue history, regarding events as particularities in which, they have no interest and preferring instead to contemplate the unity from which they believe the particularities derive their meaning. That is why, as G. K. Chesterton said, it is fitting that the Buddha be pictured with his eyes closed; there is nothing important to see.

Western civilization, in keeping with its Christian underpinnings, has always valued history highly. But as it has departed from the faith, that value has been transmuted. Rather than the arena in which providence and judgment meet the obedience or rebellion of man, history is now seen as the vehicle of salvation. Whether in the form of doctrinaire Spencerian evolution (now rare), the Enlightenment type of progress (also rare), Marxism (not so rare) or Western social engineering (the most common form of this cult), it places salvation within the institutions of history and thus fulfills the biblical definition of idolatry. The idolatries of history exalt an age (past, present, or future), or a process, or an institution, or a class, or a trend and make it normative. They place the entire meaning of life within the historical process or some part of it, allowing nothing extrinsic to it. Historical events in their relationships exhaust the whole meaning of history. In a word, the meaning of history is wholly immanent, and that is a term we shall find occurring repeatedly in our consideration of idolatry. History, to borrow the expression C.E.M. Joad used in a different context, is the whole show.

The Cult of Historicism

There is general agreement that the modern form of the historicism we have been describing finds its classic expression in the philosophy of Hegel. Karl Popper, whose work is among the most illuminating on this subject, believes that Hegel’s aim was to transcend the intractable dualism that Kant had established between phenomena—the realm of particularity, fact, event—and noumena—the world of value, spirit, faith. Hegel’s philosophy coalesced the duality of ideal and real, of right and might, finding that fusion in the historical process. This means, says Popper, that all values "are historical facts, stages in the development of reason, which is the same as the development of the ideal and of the real." Everything is fact, but some facts are also values.⁵

Woodrow Wilson’s ideas on law provide an example of how this abstruse philosophical point has come to affect men of power. He believed that laws must be adjusted to fit facts, because the law . . . is the expression of the facts in legal relationships. Laws have never altered the facts; laws have always necessarily expressed the facts.⁶ Walter Lipp-mann, a determined foe of historicism, nevertheless expressed an idea almost identical to Wilson’s, showing how pervasive the doctrine has become. Laws must change, said Lippmann, because they are based on sentiments that express the highest promise of the deepest necessity of these times.⁷

The disastrous quality in this confusion of fact and value is that it is utterly relativistic; as the facts of history change, values, and consequently laws, will have to change with them. That is the justice in Martin Sklar’s remark that whatever should happen to evolve in the social system, according to Wilson’s theory, would be morally indisputable.⁸ For Lippmann, whenever the sentiments of society change, the laws must change apace; thus, it is not only events that are normative, but sentiments. We can expect, therefore, that when the sentiments shift from nursing homes to gas chambers as the answer to the problems of the elderly, the laws presumably must comply. Lippmann, of course, would not countenance that application of his idea, but it is the logical outcome of the historicism into which he inadvertently stumbled. And while Lippmann would shrink from that outcome, we shall see further on that others do not. Thus, by the alchemy of historicism, fact is turned into value. In this fashion, says Jacques Ellul, a contemporary French social critic, history is habitually transformed in modern discourse into a value, a power which bestows value, and a kind of absolute.⁹

History as Lord of the Universe

Dutch philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd, similarly vexed by historicism, showed how its relativism issues forth in determinism. History has no windows looking out into eternity. Man is completely enclosed in it and cannot elevate himself to a supra-historical level of contemplation. History is the be-all and end-all of man’s existence and of his faculty of experience. And it is ruled by destiny, the inescapable fate.¹⁰ Just as man cannot understand history by reference to anything beyond it, so is he powerless to struggle against anything that history has a mind to accomplish. Karl Mannheim, as if to provide an illustration for Dooye-weerd’s point, dismissed the possibility that a central planning authority might be avoided. We do not have a choice between planning and not planning, he said, but only between good planning and bad.¹¹ In the conclusion to his investigation of the good society, Lippmann declared that classic liberalism was the culmination toward which history had always been reaching. Spengler closed his two volumes of doom with perhaps the best example we could find of the role of fate in historicism: "We have not the freedom to reach to this or that, but the freedom to do the necessary or to do nothing. And a task that historic necessity has set will be accomplished with the individual or against him."

Historicism, in taking freedom out of the historical experience, parallels similar tendencies in the social sciences that make it impossible to retain the Christian conviction that people are responsible and accountable for what they do. If there is no freedom to do this or that, how can it be said that responsibility inheres in the person who does something or refrains from doing it? Here is a